The Natural Georgia Series: The Chattahoochee River

Flowing
Through Time: The Chattahoochee Throughout History

by Lynn Willoughby

High in the Blue Ridge Mountains the ancient Chattahoochee River rises to
begin its trek to the Gulf of Mexico. Beginning as a bold stream, its waters
run cold and clear as it plummets to the Nacoochee Valley, and from there onto
the Atlanta Plateau where it cuts a deep trench as it flows toward the Alabama
line near West Point, Georgia. Today the river is dammed several times before
it reaches Columbus, but once it ran headlong over boulders, throwing up suds
of white water as it raced southward. A series of waterfalls mark the river's
fall line where the Coastal Plain meets the fo othills of the Piedmont region.
Before the Chattahoochee was dammed in modern times, these rapids were landmarks.
Humans-red, white, and black-were attracted to "the Falls of Coweta" where white
men would one day build Columbus at the head of river navigation.

South of the rapids the flatness of the terrain slows the Chattahoochee to
a leisurely pace as it meanders southward between the states of Georgia and
Alabama. At the southwestern corner of Georgia, the Flint River, which has shadowed
the larger stream through much of its sojourn through Georgia, marries the Chattahoochee
to form the Apalachicola River, a water body once described as having "the flavor
of alligators, moccasins, and dank swamps, laced over with beards of Spanish
moss." After about 500 adventurous miles, the longest river in the southeastern
United States broadens into an estuary just north of Apalachicola, Florida,
and then disappears into the Gulf of Mexico.

The River Valley's First Inhabitants

Since
the time of the mastodon, humankind has lived along the banks of the Chattahoochee.
The first Chattahoochee people erected large burial mounds near the river. The
huge Kolomoki complex, located on a tributary of the Chattahoochee near the
present-day town of Blakely, was built during the Woodland period (which lasted
from 1000 b.c. to a.d. 700). Kolomoki is one of the best known sites of these
ancient civilizations, dating to 1000 b.c. As many as 2,000 people lived at
Kolomoki.

A later period of mound building known as the Mississippian period (which
lasted from a.d. 700 to 1400) produced no less than 16 significant archaeological
sites along the river-all of which are located from the fall line southward.
The most important of these are the Cemochechobee site that once covered 150
acres in present-day Clay County, Georgia, and the Rood's Landing site in Stewart
County, which was probably the capital of an extensive chiefdom that controlled
all comings and going along the lower river.

Archaeologists are not certain what happened to the Rood's Landing and Cemochechobee
people or to the other Mississippian peoples of the Chattahoochee. Most experts
today agree that their civilization probably was decimated by European diseases
for which they had little immunity. The settlement at Rood's Landing seems to
have collapsed at about the time of Hernando de Soto in 1539.

As
fevers raged in the villages of the Chattahoochee River, the chiefdom that centered
on the Rood's Landing capital collapsed. Survivors from other areas moved into
the depopulated towns over the next couple of centuries. The diverse people
were often unrelated to each other and even spoke different languages, yet they
formed an alliance for mutual defense and friendship. Because speakers of the
Muskogean dialects dominated the confederacy, the Chattahoochee people were
known collectively as the Muskogee. White men later referred to them as Creeks,
probably because of their tendency to locate their towns on the banks of rivers
and their larger tributaries.

The influence of this "Creek Confederation" extended from the Appalachian
Mountains southward to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Atlantic Ocean to the
Mississippi River. The twin towns of Coweta and Cusseta near the fall line formed
its nucleus. Cusseta was situated on the eastern bank of the Chattahoochee a
few miles south of modern day Columbus. Coweta was in today's Alabama, a few
miles to the south of Cusseta, but its name was associated with the series of
waterfalls and white water ending just north of Cusseta.

Water was a sacred element to the Creek Indians. At dawn every morning, summer
and winter, every able-bodied man, woman, and child walked to the river and
plunged under the water four times. After bathing, they returned home energized
by having purged away the impurities of the preceding day. According to the
Indians' way of seeing the universe, there were spirits in the waters, in the
animals and plants, and in the rocks.

The Chattahoochee was more than a river to these people. The Indians believed
that fantastic creatures swam in the waters and attracted prey with their charms.
Besides being the habitat of magical serpents, the river was also home to fish
that gave the Creeks sustenance in summer. During the spawning season, fish
that swam upstream halted at the fall line, making the rapids of "Coweta Falls"
one of the richest fishing sites in North America. In the summer when the water
was at its lowest stage, the Indians gathered to spend the day catching fish.
Using a rotenone-like chemical found in such plants as buckeye roots, they stunned
the fish, then speared or clubbed the fish that floated to the surface. After
a day's fishing, the roasted, baked, or fried fish served as the main course
at a moonlight feast and dance.

The Indians also caught fish using gill nets, trotlines, baskets, and rock
traps. At night they built fires in their canoes to attract the fish to them,
then speared the fish or shot them with arrows as they swam toward the light.
Their usual catch included bream, bass, catfish, drum, sturgeon, and shad.

Like the prehistoric Indians before them, the Creeks used the Chattahoochee
as a highway. They devised portable leather boats to ferry across the river.
These were made by cutting poles on site and stretching animal skins over them.
When the Indians reached the other side, they threw away the poles, rolled up
the leather, and took it with them to use the next time they needed a ferry.
They made dugout canoes from elm, hickory, or cypress logs, often leaving the
bark intact. When the Indians reached their destination, they simply dragged
the dugout canoes up the bank and turned them over. Because the canoes resembled
fallen logs, they could be easily concealed.

Part recreation site, part food source, part transportation artery, part spirit,
the Chattahoochee was more important to Native Americans than modern man can
ever appreciate. The Creeks may have named the river for the rocks along its
banks, which they also held sacred. "Chat-to" may have meant "a stone;" "ho-che,"
"marked or flowered." Even though modern society has lost its collective memory
of the sanctity of the river's waters, the Chattahoochee still bears the name
of reverence that the natives bestowed on it centuries ago.

A
Land of Cotton

To the white people who followed the Indians into the Chattahoochee River
valley, the river symbolized wealth. Along this natural highway to the Gulf,
they would clear their fields and send their cotton to market. The coastal port
of Apalachicola at the river's end would one day be as familiar to British textile
manufacturers as New Orleans or Savannah as a source of cotton.

By the spring of 1819, a few hundred Georgians had already settled illegally
along the banks of the Chattahoochee. The white settlement of the valley increased
exponentially as the Creeks released by successive treaties their lands south
of Fort Gaines, Georgia, in 1814 and east of the Chattahoochee in 1825. A further
impetus to settlement came when Spain ceded Florida to the United States in
1821. When Georgians no longer found their river outlet to the Gulf blocked
by a foreign power, there was nothing to hold back the onrush.

In the early nineteenth century, virtually all travel and commerce was dependent
on rivers. Overland transportation amounted to following a narrow Indian trail
through the wilderness. The public "roads" were merely slightly widened paths
so narrow that two wagons could not pass each other without difficulty. Roads
were used only to augment river travel by connecting one river system to another.
Farmers used pole boats and rafts to carry the first cotton from Georgia downstream
to Apalachicola Bay. At the coast the crafts were unloaded, and the boats were
knocked apart and sold for their lumber. The crew usually walked home.

In the spring of 1822, the very first Apalachicola exports of cotton (266
bales) were loaded at the Apalachicola River's mouth aboard the William and
Jane for New York. A United States customhouse was established at the mouth
of the river the following year. In 1827 the Florida legislature formally established
the settlement later known as Apalachicola and directed that wharves be erected
and the harbor regulated. While the Floridians were busy with these developments,
Georgia lawmakers encouraged white settlement of the former Indian lands lying
between the Flint and Chattahoochee rivers by holding a free land lottery. Naturally,
land lying along the rivers was the most prized, and the acreage where river
navigation began on the Chattahoochee was so valuable it was not included in
the giveaway. There at the ancient Coweta Falls, a city was planned that would
become a commercial center. This strategic location would take advantage of
the river that ran southward to the Gulf and of the falls capable of powering
mills and factories. The lawmakers named this town Columbus.

Even though over 300 river miles separated Apalachicola and Columbus, they
were joined symbiotically by the Chattahoochee. Clear passage between them was
necessary for the very existence of each. As soon as the settlements were established,
a pole boat named the Rob Roy moved up and down the river, taking down
cotton and then, loaded with groceries, pushing its way back up against the
current to Columbus. But the river's merchants needed a quicker and easier form
of transportation.

The first to attempt to run a steamboat up the Chattahoochee from the bay
was John Jenkins, one of the Florida trustees of the port of Apalachicola. His
89-foot boat Fanny began the journey in the spring of 1827. By cutting
a 20-foot swath through a massive dam of fallen trees, he was able to proceed
as far as Fort Gaines by the end of July. But there the Fanny had to
wait for the winter rains before continuing upstream.

Nine days after the Fanny finally arrived at Coweta Falls, a second
boat steamed up to the future site of Columbus just as a state-appointed surveyor
was preparing to lay out the town. The boat captain took a group of local boosters
on a pleasure excursion to court some business. However, the venture turned
out to be a negative advertisement. On the return trip the boat could not make
headway against the current, and many of the passengers got off and walked home.

Nevertheless, the rough little town of Columbus was soon booming. Realizing
their dependence on the river, city leaders encouraged the state to improve
the river for navigation. Columbus residents also planned to open navigation
northward by pole boats. North of the Coweta Falls was a 20-mile stretch of
treacherous rocks and falls, but once above them it was believed one could pass
another 200 miles unimpeded. When the river was swollen, as during the winter
months, many of the rapids were covered so that one traveling downstream could
get within 4 miles of Columbus. As proof of this, one pole boat built in 1828
made at least two round trips to Gwinnett County (northeast of present-day Atlanta)
to buy corn. Cotton from the upstream regions was the first to be sold in Columbus
in the fall of 1828.

Most of the year, however, the falls acted as a great wall to separate the
two ends of the Chattahoochee. Above Columbus, white settlers at the village
of West Point, Georgia, traded with the Indians across the river and with other
whites upstream. Colonel Reuben Thornton ran barges and flatboats from West
Point to Standing Peachtree, about 60 miles upstream. Standing Peachtree, a
fort on the site of an old Indian town located on the south bank of the Chattahoochee
about 7 miles from present-day Atlanta's Five Points, became the nucleus of
a small settlement. Thornton's boats delivered groceries mostly to the isolated
settlements of north Georgia. Once, though, he set aboard a load of flour and
pointed the bow downstream. The boat bucked wildly over the falls but made it
all the way to Columbus. Once it arrived, there was no hope of returning by
water. Instead, he probably sold his battered boats at Columbus and hired a
wagon to transport his purchased sugar and coffee over trails to West Point,
then built new boats to convey the groceries from there to Standing Peachtree.
From there he wagoned the supplies yet farther to eastern Tennessee markets.
Such was the nature of transportation in the 1830s.

Others ran flatboats between Franklin (north of Columbus) and West Point as
early as 1838. But the river residents above the falls were more apt to ride
their wagons overland to Savannah or Augusta for their supplies than to trek
to Columbus. The various settlements in the present-day Atlanta area centered
on taverns at ferries that allowed travelers to cross the river and continue
on to Tennessee by land. Montgomery's Ferry was located near the fort at Standing
Peachtree. Others were Pace's Ferry, Nelson's Ferry, and Johnson's Ferry. However,
the majority of white settlers were more apt to cluster below the fall line
where their egress to the Gulf was unimpeded.

Fort Gaines was one of the earliest settlements along the Chattahoochee. A
fort here served as a refuge for whites living on both sides of the Chattahoochee
as early as 1818. The town of West Point, Georgia was settled under another
name in 1829. By 1831 it had an annual business estimated at between $40,000
and $50,000.

While commerce flourished on the eastern bank of the Chattahoochee, on the
"Indian side" of the Chattahoochee, Creek Indian civilization was slowly disintegrating.
The declining state of the once-proud Creeks attracted traders, whiskey sellers,
and speculators. In search of food or whiskey to drown their woes, the generally
harmless Indians wandered about in Columbus until dark, when they were required
by law to return to the Alabama side of the river. Within the city limits the
Indians usually posed no more than a nuisance to the white newcomers.

However, even the days of this meager way of life were numbered. In the year
the town of Columbus was born, Andrew Jackson became president of the United
States. Jackson intended to use his office to make the lives of those Indians
still remaining in the East so uncomfortable that they would voluntarily emigrate
west. As Alabama and the federal government turned the screws of law tighter,
the Indians agreed to sign the Treaty of Cusseta in 1832. This last agreement
signed by the Creek people living in the East ceded to the United States all
unoccupied Creek lands east of the Mississippi River. The government encouraged
individual Indians to sell out also, and each head of household soon found themselves
at the mercy of a myriad of land speculators.

Meanwhile, the first bridge over the Chattahoochee ushered in still more white
settlers. With every new farmer, tens of acres of timberland were cleared for
growing cotton. The river no longer ran clear. Erosion washed the iron-rich
soil into streams that fed the river, staining it red. By 1830 cotton exports
from Apalachicola had soared to 5,000 bales. This level of commerce was exactly
what was needed to sustain a healthy steamboat trade. Cotton and steamboats
complemented each other; prosperity shone down like the sun on the farmers of
the Chattahoochee.

Even though valley residents relied on the river for transportation, they
learned to be patient with it. In the dry summer months the main stem of the
river became shallow in many places. Every summer commerce slept. This inconvenience
was forgiven, however, because the river usually rose again just as it was needed
most. In the autumn as farmers ginned their newly picked cotton, the rains resumed
to swell the river. By Christmas the river was usually full and frolicsome,
ready and willing to shoulder the bounty of the autumn's harvest and deposit
it at the coast. From there creaky ships set their sails to capture the ocean
breeze loaded with Chattahoochee cotton.

Each fall the crude wagon roads that radiated out like spokes from the hub
of each riverside community conducted wagons loaded with cotton from the surrounding
fields. Columbus was the largest commercial center on the river. By 1845 the
city had 200 businesses to serve the burgeoning wagon trade. Though primarily
a cotton marketing center, Columbus also capitalized on its location at the
fall line to become a major southern manufacturing center. Water-powered mills
sprang up along the river. The first textile plant was running by 1838. Industry
and commerce were also budding just north of Columbus along the fall line. In
Troup County, cotton trading centers popped up along the river at West Point
and Vernon. In 1850 the county boasted 10 flour mills, 11 sawmills, 14 gristmills,
and four textile mills.

In addition to the major marketing centers, there were dozens of local markets
along the river wherever one found a riverside warehouse and a steamboat landing.
In the 1840s there were about 25 such establishments between Columbus and Apalachicola.
In the lonely pine forests of the Chattahoochee Valley, these wharves served
as gathering places. The sporadic arrival of a steamboat, announced by the blast
of a whistle or the firing of a gun, brought people scurrying to the landing
to watch the slaves load and unload the steamboat. Since many of these landings
were located on steep bluffs, this process was quite interesting to observe
and often perilous for the stevedores. Long wooden slides that extended from
the top of the bluff to the river's edge conducted the cargo down the hill.
Bale after bale of cotton, as well as other heavy freight (even pigs), was sent
tumbling down the steep incline to be stored in the lower decks.

Railroads Challenge River Travel

The river that ran alongside the plantations floating the cotton bales along
to sea was challenged in the 1850s by a new form of transportation. Rail travel
had many advantages over water travel. Generally rail travel was faster. Additionally,
trains could travel on a schedule that was not dependent on the seasonal level
of the river. Additionally, trains ran where rivers did not go.

Savannah was the driving force behind the Georgia railroad movement. With
its location on the Atlantic Ocean, it offered a more direct route to market
for west Georgia cotton than the Chattahoochee or Flint rivers, which took cargo
to Apalachicola, then around the long Florida peninsula to its ultimate destination.
The State of Georgia laid out a railroad to extend from Chattanooga, Tennessee
to a point about 7 miles east of the Chattahoochee River. This "terminus" became
Atlanta, a railroad town where three other rail lines joined the state's line
by 1850. Savannah's city corporation sponsored the Central of Georgia line,
which joined the state-owned Western and Atlantic line at Macon in 1843. From
there Savannah badly wanted to tap the rich cotton lands lying between the Flint
and Chattahoochee rivers.

For that purpose the city of Savannah, in conjunction with the Central of
Georgia Company, organized the Southwestern line to tap both the Chattahoochee
and Flint rivers. In 1853 the isolation of the Chattahoochee River valley was
forever dissolved. A speaker at the jubilee that celebrated the occasion of
the completion of the railroad from Savannah to the Chattahoochee emphasized
the significance of the day when he said, "[Today] is the day that unites the
waters of the Gulf with the Great Atlantic." Then the mayor of Columbus symbolically
mixed a vial of water from the Chattahoochee River with one from the Atlantic
Ocean.

The
Chattahoochee and the Civil War

After the southern states seceded from the Union and the exhilaration of the
first battles was replaced by more practical considerations, a worry hung like
a foul odor over the river valley that first spring: an abiding fear that the
enemy would capture Apalachicola and then follow the river northward through
the cotton fields of Georgia and Alabama to the industrial center of Columbus.
The fears of the valley residents were intensified when the Confederacy, lacking
the men to guard the coast, abandoned Apalachicola in the spring of 1862. On
the heels of the military evacuation, coastal residents frantically packed up
their belongings and fled upriver. Most of the refugees went to Columbus on
the Jackson and other steamers and stayed there throughout the war, but
others set up camp in the river swamp for the duration of the war.

On April 2, 1862, the Union naval forces officially took possession of the
port of Apalachicola, allowing the natives remaining to keep their fishing boats
and to oyster and fish in the bay so long as they committed no hostile act.
Everyone upriver assumed it would be only a matter of time before federal gunboats
ascended the Chattahoochee. By the end of 1862, representatives of the river
counties of Georgia and Alabama had built gun emplacements into the river bluff
at Fort Gaines and other towns. They made plans to obstruct the river so that
the Yankee vessels could not penetrate the Chattahoochee. While residents thought
in terms of defense, Confederate
officials planned an offense. They organized to build gunboats at Columbus and
Saffold, Georgia, (in Early County) capable of breaking the enemy blockade of
the coast. Although it was assumed that the boats would be completed before
the river was obstructed, both projects proceeded without regard to the other.

In November 1862, the Confederate War Department created the long-awaited
military district composed of the valleys of the Chattahoochee, Flint, Chipola,
and Apalachicola rivers, with General Howell Cobb in command. With Cobb's appointment
the many defense projects along the river finally were coordinated. He dispatched
an engineer to survey the entire river system to determine the best site for
obstructing the river and building batteries to defend those impediments. The
primary site selected was at the Narrows, a point in the Apalachicola River
near the confluence of the Chipola River.

Cobb also tried to raise an army large enough to effectively man the batteries
and the roads leading to the river. He estimated he would need 5,000, but the
Confederacy could not spare more than a few hundred men from the front.

As
the obstructions were being placed in the river at the Narrows, shipbuilders
were putting the finishing touches on the imposing CSS Chattahoochee,
a three-masted schooner about 130 feet in length. Many of the 120 crewmembers
had previously served on the Virginia (formerly the USS Merrimack)
when it battled the USS Monitor in the first duel between ironclads.
Duty on the Chattahoochee would not be so illustrious. Loyal to his first
priority of defending the river, Cobb decided he could not wait for the ship
to be finished before he ordered the chains to be drawn across the waters. Still
the ship's crew hoped that when they were ready, the obstructions could be broached
and they still could get out to sea.

But good luck never ran with the Chattahoochee. On its maiden voyage,
the engine failed and the ship struck a rock, tearing a hole in the hull. A
crewmember complained, "So the fate of the Chattahoochee has been decided
on and the officers and crew will share the same ignominious fate. Laying here
in the river to be prostrated by chills and fevers in the Spring and Summer."

As repairs were begun, the days dragged on, and the number on board the Chattahoochee
diminished from deaths and desertions. The captain himself was soon ordered
to Texas. "What is to become of the 'Chatt' and her crew?" wrote another officer
of the ship. "We are certainly to leave the river." However, a few months later
in June 1863, the ship's steam boiler exploded, killing 19 crewmen and dashing
any remaining hopes that the vessel could serve the Confederacy.

Ironically, when the enemy finally arrived, he came overland from the north
and west instead of by way of the river. Atlanta turned out to be of even more
strategic importance than the industrial center of Columbus because of the former
city's rail hub. By taking Atlanta and controlling the railroad, the Union would
cut the Confederacy in two. General William Tecumseh Sherman, who by 1864 commanded
the Union forces of the Western Theater, set his sites on destroying the vital
supply linkages needed by the Confederacy. With greater manpower than his adversary,
he was able to flank the Confederates who had no choice but to retreat by degrees
to the northwestern bank of the Chattahoochee. Then in a crucial maneuver that
surprised the southerners, Sherman's army crossed the Chattahoochee and laid
siege to the city. After several bloody battles, Atlanta surrendered on September
2, 1864 in total chaos.

Civilians fled Atlanta and its nearby towns for the relative safety of Columbus
and Macon. Confederate casualties filled makeshift Columbus hospitals to overflowing.
Food and supplies became scarce. Inflation was out of control. Chickens cost
$4 to $5 each, and butter was $5 to $6 per pound. High unemployment made prices
seem even higher. Even though Sherman marched to Savannah in November 1864,
Columbus was not to be spared attack from the Union army.

In spring of 1865, from Alabama, Union cavalry commander General James H.
Wilson divided his eastbound soldiers into two wings. One drove toward West
Point, where the soldiers cut the railroad lines and destroyed supplies. The
other, larger force headed for the factories of Columbus, which Wilson called
the "key to Georgia."

On the Alabama side of the Chattahoochee River, Columbus factory workers,
young boys, and old men waited nervously for the enemy, but in the darkness
of that Easter Sunday night, the Federals slipped past them. The next day the
invaders destroyed every industrial facility except the three gristmills. They
set afire the cotton warehouses. They torched the ironclad Muscogee,
only two weeks away from completion. Ironically, the destruction of Columbus
was unnecessary, as the war had essentially ended seven days earlier at Appomattox
Courthouse, Virginia when Lee surrendered to Grant.

The Chattahoochee River had suffered as much as the people during the war.
River captains found the river silted up and choked with wreckage in 1865. But
as the people rebounded, so would the waterway. While the river was never again
as central to the valley as it had been before the railroads came, the next
era would be its last hurrah. The golden days of steamboating still lay ahead.

The
Golden Years

The postwar steamboat era displayed more sophistication than the antebellum
period had. New, opulent thoroughbreds replaced the more practical workhorses
of the antebellum period. Individuals and companies owned lines of boats instead
of only one boat. Innovations in service made river travel more reliable, and
technological breakthroughs made it safer. Freight became more diversified with
lumber products, fertilizer, and honey crowding the ubiquitous cotton bales.

The Naiad was probably the best-known steamer that ever plied the river,
since it held the record for the longest continuous service on the Chattahoochee.
Its dining room was set on the upper deck. Waiters moved noiselessly among the
tables in starched white uniforms. Boat cooks were renowned for the flavor and
abundance of their fare. On the down run there were "plenty of hot biscuits,
hot cakes, meats, vegetables, pastries and the like." Returning from Apalachicola,
plates brimmed with fresh shrimp, oysters, and fish.

By 1900 the nature of steamboat service changed noticeably. Instead of calling
on every homestead or business, boats stopped at only 28 major communities or
railroad junctions. And 16 years later, the steamers made only five stops. The
river's natural character of drying up to a rivulet in the region north of Eufaula
during periods of low rainfall was exacerbated by settlement of more lands along
its banks. As farmers and developers loosed the red clay by forest clearing
and field plowing, wind and rain swept the dirt into the riverbed. Silt filled
the channel, and dredging operations were never thorough enough to remedy the
situation. After 1900 the river trade shifted to the lower river, where navigation
was not so difficult.

As water transportation became less reliable, its competition improved. By
1916 rail lines crossed over the Chattahoochee and Apalachicola Rivers in eight
places below Columbus. At Columbus five different rail lines radiated from the
city, and three railroads crossed the upper river between Columbus and the railroad
hub of Atlanta. To make matters worse for the future of river travel, rails
now ran in the same direction as the river instead of perpendicularly. When
the railroad competed directly with the river, rail's more dependable and direct
routes were sure to win.

In
addition to the railroad, the river had to compete with improved roads. By World
War I the automobile had become affordable to most Americans. New car owners
pushed for better roads. Paved roads encouraged a nascent trucking industry,
which also challenged river travel. In 1923 the John W. Callahan, the
last of the old-time paddle wheelers, struck a snag and sank in the lower river.
Only one more passenger steamboat would ever paddle up and down the Chattahoochee.
The George W. Miller ran excursions during the 1940s but its career ended
with World War II.

The public would never again know the Chattahoochee as intimately as it had
during the age of the steamboat. Yet the river was far from forgotten when the
old paddle wheelers disappeared. In the ensuing years, reliance on the river
would actually increase as people came to depend on hydroelectric power to light
both the cities and the countryside and to turn the wheels of industry.

The Power of the Chattahoochee

The South's first "large-scale dam" built to produce hydroelectric power was
the North Highlands Dam, built by a consortium 2.5 miles north of Columbus in
1899. A second Chattahoochee hydroelectric dam was erected at Goat Rock in the
falls north of Columbus. On December 19, 1912, special trains brought over 1,000
Columbus residents to witness the dedication of the new power plant. With the
throwing of a switch, electricity surged down the power lines that stretched
out to the north to LaGrange and West Point and eventually to Atlanta.

The advent of long-distance electrical transmission forever changed the way
industrialists viewed the river. The Chattahoochee had once served only those
towns located along its banks, but now the river provided power and lighting
to people who could not even see the Chattahoochee from their homes. New mills
in West Point, Newnan, and LaGrange took advantage of the power produced by
hydroelectric dams.

The Bartlett's Ferry Dam of 1924 became the northernmost dam in the rapids
of the Chattahoochee. Built 4 miles upstream from Goat Rock, its storage reservoir,
known as Lake Harding, covered almost 6,000 acres and insured that the downstream
dams had a constant flow of water for power generation.

These power generation structures added to the degradation of the Chattahoochee's
navigability just as the First World War caused federal government officials
to appreciate the importance of rivers to national security. The Army Corps
of Engineers, President Woodrow Wilson, and Congress believed building an intercoastal
waterway system to connect all Gulf of Mexico rivers by a protected saltwater
channel along the coast was vital to national security. The federal officials
authorized a survey of the Chattahoochee to consider improving the channel all
the way to Atlanta by a series of locks and dams. The eventual report by the
district engineer was not encouraging, but civic leaders along the river system
took up the mantle of river improvement and flood control, and they labored
for decades to lure "progress" into the valley.

West Point had more to gain from flood control than any other river town.
In 1886 the river had slithered into West Point like a stealthy, red serpent.
As the waters covered downtown streets, the steamer Charlie Jones circled
the block. The covered bridge that spanned the river "rolled down the river
like a log." Other floods followed in 1901, 1912, 1915, and 1918. The people
of West Point learned to coexist with the river's quirky nature. They raised
their wooden sidewalks to 5 feet above street level so they were less inconvenienced
during the periodic inundations. But the worst flood of all tumbled down the
valley in 1919. The Atlanta Journal detailed the destruction it caused:
"The town of West Point is all but bankrupt. Until last Tuesday night there
was no fairer or more prosperous community in Georgia. Clustered in the lap
of the Chattahoochee River . . . it was rich in possessions and rich in resources.
Its mills were humming, its merchants were preparing for a record Christmas
season, its farmers were holding their cotton for higher prices, its homes were
as cheerful as any you could find in Dixie, its 5,000 people happy.

"Then the yellow Chattahoochee, swollen with the heaviest rainfall in its
history, burst from its banks, swept through the streets of the city, rose above
the high sidewalks, rose above the high foundations of the buildings, rose above
the stocks of goods on the shelves, rose above the pianos and sideboards and
beds, rose until West Point was only one vast lake of mud and water."

Although West Point residents were the hardest hit, downstream residents were
not spared. In
Columbus the deluge was referred to as "the Pershing Flood" because it coincided
with the visit of General "Black Jack" Pershing to Fort Benning. Three years
later, the general was again at the post when another deluge was dubbed "the
Second Pershing Flood." Commenting on the frequency of the rises in the river,
the general said, "I thought all along Columbus would make a good Army post,
but I'm beginning to think it could also be used by the Navy."

Coping with the river's extremes became a way of life in West Point. A siren
was installed to warn folks that the river had left its banks. A river gauge
was placed under a floodlight at Smith Lanier's telephone building on the riverbank.
It became the custom for men to keep vigil there when high water threatened,
as if by their will alone they could hold the waters back.

In
1953 congress authorized the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint Project, which
set out to construct four dams on the Chattahoochee to address issues of flood
control, hydroelectric power generation, and navigation. The four dams were
scattered along the river beginning with the southernmost one, the Jim Woodruff
Dam, at Chattahoochee, Florida where the waters of the Chattahoochee and Flint
rivers converged. This undertaking named for James W. Woodruff Sr., who had
worked for decades for river improvement, included a dam for electrical power
generation and a lock to allow boaters to pass upstream. Water dammed behind
this structure would be known as Lake Seminole. Fifty miles north of the Jim
Woodruff Dam, a second lock and dam were planned at Columbia, Alabama. The reservoir
behind this George W. Andrews Dam would not widen so much as deepen the Chattahoochee
so that a 9-foot navigational depth could be maintained for the next 26 river
miles.

Eighty miles north of the Jim Woodruff Dam, planners sketched out the Walter
F. George Lock and Dam near the Fort Gaines, Georgia, and Eufaula, Alabama,
area. This structure became the largest producer of electricity on the river,
and its 45,200,000-acre reservoir became a fishing mecca. At the opposite end
of the Chattahoochee, approximately 350 river miles from the Jim Woodruff Dam
and 50 miles north of Atlanta, the Buford Dam was designed to regulate streamflow
of the entire system so that a controlling depth of 9 feet could be maintained
from the Gulf to Columbus. The lake behind this northernmost dam was named Lake
Sidney Lanier after the renowned poet of the Victorian era who wrote The
Song of the Chattahoochee. All four of these dams were completed by 1963,
and Georgia Power Company built a final hydroelectric dam near Columbus known
as Oliver Dam in 1959.

Beyond the Georgia Power dams at Columbus and the rocks and white water that
forbade navigation between Columbus and West Point, Georgia's capital city refused
to be excluded from the high-stakes game of post-World War II prosperity. As
one Atlantan put it, a longer delay in developing navigation above the fall
line would "imperil our entire commercial and industrial structure." Boosters
easily saw that their best hope lay in joining forces with West Point in pushing
for a dam that would save the latter town from another devastating flood because
this dam could have the secondary purpose of backing up the water sufficiently
to Atlanta to deepen the river for barges.

Mother Nature added her voice to the persuasive powers of the West Point Dam
advocates. Early in 1961 almost 6 inches of rain fell on Atlanta in a 24-hour
period. As the waters rushed downstream they washed out eight bridges in Troup
County alone. Twenty others were damaged. Columbus, West Point, and neighboring
towns were declared disaster areas. The dam's promoters took advantage of the
emergency to request immediate funding, and in 1962 Congress finally authorized
the West Point Dam (although it was not completed until 1975).

The northernmost dam envisioned for the Chattahoochee River was Buford. Like
the others downstream of it, Buford was created for hydroelectric generation,
flood control, and navigation. Perhaps its most important function was to provide
a more dependable source of drinking water for Atlanta's explosive post-world
war growth. After acquiring over 58,000 acres of rolling farmland, the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers began clearing a circular swath of land for the shoreline
in 1950. The farms and houses inside that circle remained standing when the
rushing waters of the Chattahoochee and its sister, the Chestatee, covered them
seven years later. Poking out above the new lake's surface was a cluster of
four mountaintops. These islands were developed by the state of Georgia into
a popular resort now in private hands.

Today more than 60 recreational areas rim Lake Lanier. These include everything
from a water park to a championship golf course, but also include marinas, campgrounds,
and parks. It is one of the most popular man-made lakes in the country welcoming
approximately 16 million visitors each year to its 38,000 acres. Twenty-three
thousand boats ply these waters yearly. Ten thousand houses dot the shoreline.
Most of these structures are the pricey second homes of Atlantans who overrun
the lake each weekend.

The Atlantans who had hoped the dam's completion would be only the first step
in connecting them by water to the Gulf of Mexico were gradually disappointed.
The immense cost of the Vietnam War, which ended in 1972, as well as an international
fuel crisis, fed a virulent strain of inflation throughout the 1970s. That condition,
coupled with a postwar recession, sucked the vibrancy out of the American economy.
No longer would discretionary funds be used to conform the physical landscape
to man's economic ambition.

Instead of valuing the Chattahoochee River as a transportation artery, today's
Atlantans see the river as a source of drinking water and the key to future
growth. The states of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida all claim the river as their
own and insist on their rights to use the river unimpeded. While bureaucrats
squabble over water rights, the river flows quietly to the sea, a forgotten
highway that remains the valley's most important asset.

Lynn Willoughby is a former professor of history and is presently a freelance
writer. She has written two books about the Chattahoochee River. Her most recent
work is Flowing Through Time: The History of the Lower Chattahoochee River.